Charles M. Tatum photographs of American Friends Service Committee Coal Relief

The President’s Committee on Unemployment Relief and the Federal Children’s Bureau requested that the American Friends Service Committee provide relief for the children of unemployed mine workers in the poverty stricken bituminous coal fields in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, and West Virginia during the winter of 1931-1932. The mining industry was particularly hard hit during the Depression when mines closed and other fuels gained market share. The following winter, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation worked through county agencies in most areas, but the AFSC continued to administer some programs in W. Virginia and Kentucky. By 1933-1934, the emphasis had shifted from relief to education and social reconstruction.

Charles Maris Tatum worked in West Virginia and Kentucky for the AFSC Coal Relief mission from 1931-1933. He was the son Mary Biddle McCollin Tatum and Oliver Parry Tatum. His mother was a doctor and worked in Warsaw for several years after World War I. Charles Tatum was born in 1903 and married Margaret O. Garrett at Lansdowne Monthly Meeting in 1939. An engineer, he was a graduate of Haverford College and member of Radnor Monthly Meeting. He died February 1984. The supervisor of the coal mission team in W. Virginia and Kentucky was Mary Kelsey, a Quaker social worker and pacifist who had worked with the American Friends Reconstruction Unit after WWI. She was born June 15, 1877, in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a member of Germantown Monthly Meeting in 1920. She died March 23, 1948.